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About Me

I'm still relatively new here and build this cave within a few weeks, behind the screens I'm also helping out in moderating for the game database everyday and creating/photoshopping graphics for future releases as well as working on a theme, bezels and collecting data to expand my collection for Big Box. The cave is still not finished yet, have to do some sweet black/UV-light and arcade/retrogaming artwork from Etsy to finish it off.
Today I finally finished my mini gameroom (check it out @jaceroni), the square (check carpet boundaries) inside the small room is about 2x2 meters lol. I just installed and setup my last addition; the marquee screen. I was a bit nervous it wouldn't work out as I hoped it would but it did. My pc has only a HDMI and VGA port so I had to use the VGA port. It's a bit of a risk as the screen (the cheap 21:9, LG 25UM58-p) native resolution is 2560x1080, not possible through my VGA. I got a VGA-HDMI converter from Startech which outputs 1920x1080 max through VGA which is very nice but to get a good aspect ratio on 21:9 in 1920 you'll have to set (in my case I had to hack the registry for the old AMD HD 7660) the resolution to 1920x810 and it friggin worked! At this distance I can hardly even see the difference between 2560 and 1920 as the screen is pretty small. But for the future I'm set when switching to a different system which will support the UHD 49 inch screens resolution and the 2560 on the marquee screen. The carpet was cheap, the recliner was a second hand for 40 euro as was the media cabinet. Behind the 49 inch I placed 2 cheap led strips to get a bit of that Philips ambiance vibe.
On the screen you'll also see a theme/project I'm working on which is based on Futurestate by @Hexxxer whom very kindly gave me permission to release it in the future. It's still in a very early beta stage and I'm planning to release the theme with custom and cut out high res arcade cabinet images, as well as cut out arcade carts/pcb's and more. I'm still thinking about the theme's name, something like 'Futurestate Neon Deluxe'.
I think that covers it I guess I can't say it enough, everyone should have a marquee screen, it looks amazing with those beautiful high res marquee artworks out there, it really adds to the experience, there's some amazing bezels out there as well which will make the experience even more complete in my opinion, ofcourse a real cabinet is even cooler but I'm not that handy so this is my alternative path, I'm in heaven now lol

To quickly get to the point: I have an ultrawide monitor. 21:9 aspect ratio, 3440x1440 resolution. It's a great monitor, I love it. But, it's not a very common aspect ratio (certainly not in the emulator world) and thus things get a bit annoying.
Launchbox, bigbox, emulators etc. etc. all work fine on this screen (or at the very least a lot better than Hyperspin), that's not the problem. The thing is, pretty much all media files are in a 16:9 format. I see a cool video-collection in the downloads section; arg, 16:9. I see a cool set of backgrounds; arg 16:9. I don't have the skill nor the time to start creating piles upon piles of my own 21:9 media, so I'm wondering if it's possible to force BigBox in a 16:9 aspect ratio (thus with black bars on the sides in my case). I'm not 100% sure if it would look better at 16:9 or not (in my personal opinion of course), but that's what I would like to find out.
Forcing bigbox to 16:9 on my 21:9 screen instead of creating 21:9 media would have the added benefit though that if I were to take my launchbox installation (which is on an external hdd) to another pc which has a normal 16:9 monitor it would still look fine instead of having stretched out media.
So... Any thoughts on this? Any idea how (or if) I can force bigbox in 16:9? Thanks!